


Five Senses

by Simply8Steps



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Identity Issues, canon-typical angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-06 00:44:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11025012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply8Steps/pseuds/Simply8Steps
Summary: Can we trust our senses when we can't even trust the truth of who we are or what we know?





	Five Senses

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ 11/09/2008.

Gaius Baltar spread his hands in front of him unseeing. In the realm of delusions and religious awakening, sight of reality was slowly gliding away from his fingertips. Leaving him to stumble in the wake of the fervor he himself had stirred.

What was real?

Certainly not this blond angelic demon dressed in red. Was she?

What was real? 

As a scientist everything he believed and thought had been established and rooted firmly in fact and experience.

What was real?

He couldn’t see anymore. He didn’t know anymore.

 

* * *

 

Saul found himself constantly floundering. His life, his grip on what was his life was loosening and yet, he was stubborn enough to hold on as tightly as ever.

He drowned in the scents, no longer being able to distinguish. Ellen. Ambrosia. Caprica Six.

_Fear. Anger. Betrayal. Doubt… Fear. Fear. Fear…_

Staring at the weakly green liquid in his glass (the good stuff had long since disappeared), he wondered when he started mistrusting his own nose.

Maybe it was when he started mistrusting his own sense of life… Doubtful of what he even was. Doubtful that maybe he killed the woman he loved for a lie.

So he drowned himself in the smell of alcohol and guilt… hoping that they would mix with the bitter scents of fear and just go away.

Too bad demons tend to persist even when one drinks himself to oblivion. Now he can’t even find her scent anymore.

 

* * *

 

Tyrol didn’t know what he was doing anymore. All that mattered to him now was the fact that nothing mattered anymore. Life was a frakking joke…, and he was the punch line.

Or maybe just the punching bag.

He found that the voices of the people around him no longer registered. He recognized none of them. Not the people he had worked with for years, not the clanking of a ship that has been his second home where once he could have deciphered the condition of the ship just by a single spluttering of an engine.

He can’t hear them. All of it has just faded into a dull roaring.

Sometimes it’s the roaring rage and anger that he knows lays sleeping somewhere deep inside of him. Other times, he likes to think that it’s just the memory of a windswept, desolate Earth welcoming him home. It was fitting. It was right.

The dead doesn’t belong with the living. (Was he even really alive?)

And Earth was clearly dead.

Not that he cared either way.

 

* * *

 

Samuel T. Anders.

That was – _is_ his name.

He was a part of the Caprican Buccaneers pyramid team. Team captain (and don’t anyone forget it).

He was a resistance leader. He is a rookie pilot.

He was a human. He is a cylon.

He’s afraid, and confused, and uncertain, but he is sure of one thing: He loves Kara Thrace. With every part of his being.

Maybe he was foolish. Maybe he is hopeful, or maybe… he just doesn’t want to lose his last link to a world that was that much less complicated (though she’s the one making it that much more complicated now).

Any frakking they do lately seems to always be in anger, or spite, or desperation. Mostly it’s the last.

A fevered, frenzied pace. Harsh words, and even harsher touches.

But most of all, he’s realized that he no longer tastes the woman he once knew: saline sweat, metal tang, and a strange sweetly acerbic flavor that reminded him of oranges…

No, all his tongue tasted as they grasped and pulled at clothing and hit the rack… were ashes.

 

* * *

 

Tory had lied.

It was nothing new when working in politics.

But she had lied to Galen when she said that she was enjoying all the new experiences and freedom her discovered cylonity afforded her.

A numbness settled into her, and she watches fascinated as Baltar flinches with each hair being plucked. Envies him his ability to still sense pain and pleasure.

She feels nothing anymore, in this fuddled up world she used to know. Her last tie to humanity abruptly snapped as she watched the woman she once admired strung tighter and tighter on a larger and larger gap. She despised the weak feelings, of hurt, of betrayal that washes over her as Laura Roslin, President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol abruptly turns away. Such easily broken trust was worth nothing to her. _Or so she tried to convince herself_.

Maybe… just maybe, if she were fully cylon… maybe if she joined her brethren… then she would feel again?

Maybe if she turned away from all that she thought she had once known, deleted all previous certainties from her system (she could do that couldn’t she?), she would finally feel again.

She clamps down on the voice that whispers in her mind, incises her thoughts with other maybes...

_Maybe if you fully embraced humanity, you would feel again? Maybe if you forgave and was forgiven? Maybe?... Maybe?... Maybe?..._

Her fingertips glide along her throat, wanting to feel the movements of her breaths.

Maybe. Maybe not.

**Author's Note:**

> When I originally wrote this, it was pre-season 4.5, and I mentioned that this was NOT a venture of a guess that Baltar was the fifth. It was just a coincidence that he happened to fit while the other four were the revealed "Final Five" at the time.


End file.
